Susan, the irony is that the painting on the wall is one of my friend's oil paintings. The girl in red is my daughter. The area above the kitchen cabinets is from my daughters house. The furniture and decoration that did not come from the 3D ware house came straight from IKEA. IKEA knows when I am doing a low budget project because I skulk through the store with my digital camera. The shield on the wall is from a Sikh warrior. My client was a Sikh, but I don't think he noticed. I think he is more an MBA than a warrior Sikh. Very nice guy to work with. I have distances and angles to objects roughly worked out when I go on my photo safaris so I am in the ball park for adding things to the render. If I am not spot on, I can do a little warping in PS. That foreground palm was also IKEA.

I am also looking to actually do some interior design for higher end clients, but I do not have that level of relationship building going just yet.

Oh, and to fill out the list of supporting cast, on the Phoenix Condo site in the bird eye interior the dog sleeping on the carpet is my terrier Cacique.

I like the wetter technique because the wet sky has a closer link to the rendering of the building. IE same style. In the other the clouds are too photo realistic for the rest of the picture.

Susan, see the renderings at http://www.phoenixluxurycondos.com. Go to the renderings tab. These were my first commercial building renders. I didn't want to go that extreme on the wide angle but the client prevailed. These are perspective in SU and hand rendered in PS. I am making steady progress in KT, but have not yet mastered a smooth workflow. The client had building plans but no interior design. I just did a quick IKEA idea raid and produced an instant interior rather than a fully developed design. Still it was a valuable experience that helped bring the whole process together for me.

In 1827 Delacroix was using the perspectivist Thénot to work on The Death of Sardanapalus (sp?)(Paris, Louvre). Also Millet was know to hire perspecteurs to bring technical correctness to his preliminary sketches.

I have always enjoyed the loose field sketches of Delacroix as much as I enjoy the exquisite technical mastery of his finished work. I keep hoping that some day someone will find the lost sketchbooks. But just think about how much money he could have saved if he had purchased a copy of SketchUp instead of relying on high-priced perspecteurs.

Tina, thanks for moving this over to another thread. Susan your comment on societal influence on how we see is on the right track. A friend of mine is an accomplished plein air regional painter here in Arizona. However he gets kind of tense when he sees some of my more extreme perspectives. He gets quite involved in explaining why they are technically incorrect. I get involved explaining that they are technically correct but simply beyond the range of what the human eye sees and the human brain perceives.

The seeing part is easier to demonstrate than the perception part. For the seeing part you just set up a simple perspective with a "normal cone of vision and have a critic just extend the view using the rules already used and soon they see the distortions beginning to appear under their own hand.

The perception thing is much harder to impart. The brain samples our environment, we see the movement of that sabre-toothed tiger in the periphery of our vision and our cave person instincts cause us to shift our head or our eyes to look. We have seen two related scenes with a very narrow cone of sharp vision. The brain merges and remembers those images. It is hard for use to really concentrate on how small an area our sharp vision covers. And thankfully we don't need to think about the integration of scenes or we could never drive a car. Magically the brain jumps in and just does all the work as a background operation. Really quite amazing.

However as artists working on a 2D plane we need to be able to pull apart and manipulate our perceptions on an as needed basis. It is not easy and it is the difference between those who can draw (paint) and those that can't. We can shut off the sampling and integration to a grater degree than other people who can not just sit and stare.

I am taking Tina's suggestion as I don't want to hijack the conversation, but I am totally with you Edson, I have more view and technical cameras than I have digital cameras so rise, falls, swings, shifts,tilts, Scheimpflug rule and Hinge Rule are all familiar territory for me. However I could never spell Scheimpflug so I just looked it up and found something new and ironic. The Scheimpflug rule was discovered by Jules Carpentier, and the Hinge rule was discovered by Schiempflug and I am not sure if Hinge was a person or a thing.

Regarding the hotel. I am somewhat of an iconoclast and don't feel bound by one set of rules in regard to "distortion." I prefer to choose between what the mind sees and the brain remembers on a case-by-case basis. For a conservative banker I would choose corrected perspective and for a head-banging aficionado of graphic novel I would go with extreme perspective. For a head-banging far-out banker??????

OK I am off to follow Tina to the new spot for now.

Bom dia.

Thirty hours, how does that relate to actual days start to finish?

I am also inteested in how long it took.

Edson, you make an interesting point about perspective and perceptions. Although it is a very basic question I have been doing soem thinking about what is an acceptable cone of vision. SketchUp defaults to 35 degrees. The guy that wrote SketchUp for dummies recommneds 45 degrees. In some experiments I have done the true amount seems far less, but in reality our eyes move constantly and stitch the accumulated experience together in our memories which make it seem wider. I put my face two feet from the screen and concentrated on not moving my eyes. Without eye movement I could only read five words with relative clarity. (By the way lock the door if you try the experiment. My wife walked in and I am still trying to convince her that I am not crazy or blind). I did a render of a very small condo and the developer kept on insisting on seeing more. I backed up to the wall. Not enough. I removed the wall and backed up until the end of the room began to show. Not enough. I suggested the devoper start selling larger condos. "That wasn't funny." I zoomed through 35 deegrees, 45 degrees, 55 degrees, and on out to 70 degrees. The developer loved it. Artist friends took me to task for improper perspective. I insisted the perspective was correct but it was something that flys could see better than humans. Where do you call it quits in tight spaces and do you ever accept "distorted" perspective as a dramatic tool?

Damn. Derek, I wish you hd stubld onto this request sooner, but I just sent out a draft of the article to UCDA which they will be fitting into the magazine on Monday. Looked at your site adn there is no question you guys do good work.

How many people have participated in forensic testimony using sketchup?

1. How did you get the business (How did the client reach you or how did you reach the client.)?
2. How does the court certify that what you are presenting is a legitimate technique?
3. How did the case turn out?
4. What should I know or how should I prepare if I add this kind of work to my services?
5. What kinds of things did the opposing attorney do to poke holes in your testimony?
6. Did you do animations?
7. How do you address the question of accuracy? We know sketchup measures to 1/64th of an inch, but in photomatch there have to be a lot of Vaiables introduced. Isuppose you could do a number of models and measure them extensively against the reality and develop a range of accuracy.
8. What sort of fees do you get for Forensic work?
9. This is the corner bar, does anyone want to buy me a drink?

Furniture grade oak plywood. I pencil everything out on the center sheet. Then I apply the stain so it just goes slightly over the pencil marks. That way there is a lot of raw wood to make a good bond with the glue. If you glue first the squeeze out will seal the wood so it will not take stain at the joints.

Also you need to support the door evenly during glue up because the individual sheets will not resist bending and if they bend during glue up the door will be permanently ruined. I framed the pantry door nicely. The frame on the bathroom door is warped because I forced it. Somethime in hte next decade I need to tear it out and try again.

What would it take to render the maximum size Kerky rendering with most of the parameters set to good or excellent in four hours? Can that be done with a quad processor? Are there 8 way processors? If so could Kerky take advantage of them?

Thanks for the info.

Is an Intel Pentium 4 3GHz processor enough horsepower when doing KT renderings at max resolution?

Two day long renders is getting old.

Billet, I do a fair amount of professional photography and at one time I was the communications director and photographer for Boyle Engineering and Architecture so I have a lot of experience nuancing light to get what I want. But I am just starting to climb the learning curve here in this part of the virtual world.

The match behind the physics of lighting goes way beyond the simple inverse square law. I do like to use emitters but there is a terrible price to pay in rendering time. One of my renders ran for five days. I am not sure how often I can live with that.

Fletch has been great help but he can provide the answers faster than I have been able to absorb them. As they say in the orient, "A journey of 10,000 miles starts with but one step." What they don't tell you is you might not live that long and you will wear out a lot of sneakers if you do. Anyhow I am glad to help in any way I can.

Yes you do have a great country. I have a postcard of some Brasilian girls at the beach on my bulletin board and my wife does not even seem to mind. But she is from Venezuela.

Cut the saltillo with one of those little $100 diamond bladed tile saws from home depot. I cheated several ways on setting the tile upside down. I used little dabs of construction adhesive to get a temporary grip and then surrounded that with mortar. Also used some special nails with soft washers that pinned the tiles in place while the mess set. Then I tore off the washers and could grab the nail heads with vice grips and twist them out. The grout was a case of putting plastic on the floor and picking up fallen grout and sticking it back in until it stuck.

If I had been in sketchUp, I could have just turned the house upside down until the project was finished.

I even cut the middle tile as a keystone but I think that might be more vanity than structural reality.

This is a low budget project. I have to put most of the effort in to some problem solving rather than the rendering. If it was only about rendering I would have photographed some real people from matching angles.

I was thinking about making the people translucent gray forms to downplay them, what do you think about that approach?

Gaeius I am sleepless and my eyes are going shut, but this is fascinating. We will talk more.

I am writing an article for University and College Designer's Magazine on the use of SketchUp to do campus maps and computer generated illustrations. If anyone has done higher education work along these line or anything else higher ed related please contact me. I want to broaden the opinion base of my article and would like to quote a few people and show some samples other than my own.

The only downside is I need input ASAP or sooner. If you know some one else that you think would be appropriate give me their name.